I Just Dumped Whos.amung.us and Chartbeat for Woopra

Something about realtime web analytics is just cool to me. I think it’s the idea of visualizing the interactions with distant objects. Well, people in this case. I think it’s like why guys like laser pointers–it allows you to touch things that are far away.

Anyway, I’ve been using Whos.amung.us and Charbeat on and off for the last several months, and I’ve been mostly happy with them.

Woopra, by far, has the slickest realtime web analytics out there. Here are a few features:

A Desktop Client (including OS X)
The screenshot you see above came from the desktop client, and let me tell you..it looks like dashboard from STTNG. No joke. Super clean.

Near Instantaneous Results
From the time of a hit coming in, it takes about 1-2 seconds to show up on the interface. It’s stunningly fast.

Brilliant Analytics
While most competitor products have over-time analytics as something of an afterthought, Woopra can almost replace an actual analytics product by itself.

Realtime Chat
This one is downright spooky. As you’re looking at a visitor (which you can tag), you can elect to chat with them, and it’ll spawn a window in their browser coming from you. You can also enable an option to have site users chat with each other.

Seriously. Give it a try. I cancelled $20/month worth of services to move to Woopra at $5/month. And if you take less than 30K hits per month you can get in for free. ::